In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, crafting products and services that deeply resonate with users necessitates a profound understanding of their needs, desires, and behaviors.

Two methodologies have emerged as pivotal in enhancing user research and bolstering product adoption: Design Thinking and User Experience/User Interface (UX/UI) Design. While both prioritize user-centricity, their methodologies, techniques, and problem-solving approaches diverge.

Design Thinking epitomizes a human-centered approach to innovation, championing empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

It’s about cultivating cross-disciplinary collaboration and co-creation, uniting stakeholders from diverse backgrounds to collectively tackle intricate challenges, fostering empathy, and ensuring solutions resonate with real-world needs. Design Thinking empowers teams to iteratively explore and refine ideas, embracing failure as a natural facet of the creative journey. It thrives on exploration and experimentation, welcoming bold, open-ended questions such as "How might we..." to challenge assumptions and ignite creativity.

During my time at the World Bank as a Design Thinking Consultant, we organized a hackathon to inspire the development of apps focused on information communications technology in Uganda's agricultural sector. We engaged farmers, technologists, and government stakeholders to collaboratively create solutions for improving farmer yields. This involved conducting empathy interviews to understand users' needs, focusing on the 'why' rather than the 'what' or 'how'. We then distilled these insights into a guiding question and utilized collaborative brainstorming to discover potential solutions. The rapid development of prototypes followed this. Designers iteratively tested, brainstormed, and prototyped, refining their solutions continuously.

User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) Design are dedicated to crafting seamless, intuitive user experiences across digital interfaces. While sharing the objective of user-centricity, UX/UI Design diverges from Design Thinking in several vital aspects.

In UX/UI Design, structured processe and methodologies, encompassing user research, wireframing, prototyping, and usability testing, guide the development process with a strong emphasis on visual and interaction design. This collaborative user research focuses on gathering insights directly from users through methods like interviews, surveys, observation, and analytics to understand their behaviors, preferences, and pain points, prioritizing solutions aligned with practicality, feasibility, and the constraints of project scope, technology, and user expectations.

With UX/UI Design, we ask specific questions.

In my role as a user experience consultant tasked with helping to design a mental health mobile app for workers, our process began with conducting interviews. We asked specific, open-ended questions that prompted participants to delve into past experiences, such as “Can you tell me about a time when you felt overwhelmed?" "How did you cope?” or “What do you do when you’re feeling anxious?” As a UX Researcher, I avoided hypothetical questions like “How might we…” as they can lead to speculative responses rather than grounded insights. Instead, we gathered concrete examples to support answers, ensuring clarity and understanding throughout the interview prcess. User research interviews steer clear of hypothetical questions to prevent speculative responses and instead focusing on past experiences and real-world scenarios. Furthermore, UX interviewers ask open-ended questions that encourage detailed responses while avoiding leading questions that could bias participants' answers.

Despite the debate, I believe whether we should speculate versus source-grounded insights is not an "either-or" scenario but rather a "yes, and" opportunity.

Community-centered organizations can achieve optimal outcomes by integrating the strengths of both methodologies and tailoring them to the specific needs of each project. True expertise lies in knowing when to employ each method: understanding when to ask hypothetical or open-ended questions and recognizing when to delve into detailed visual and interaction design. With the right nuance, these methodologies, together, provide a robust framework for developing innovative and impactful solutions that resonate with communities, align with user's needs and drive success in awareness, adoption and implementation.